Carlos Fuentes (1928-2012) was one of the great mystical writers of the 20th Century, in that no matter how clearly he stated his theme or outlined his moral stance it is still well-nigh impossible to explain his vision. The intriguingly elaborate title Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins is a set of five novellas he had published in 1989. A translation by Thomas Christensen followed the year after and got little attention. Hardly surprising. These stories are confusing labyrinths, metaphysical mysteries for the soul and some are far more readable than others.

The novella form only adds to the level of difficulty. It is an ungainly object – padded at length compared to the short story but not long enough for the full involvement that a novel can offer. Most writers deal with these creations by either issuing one solo or by inserting it into a collection of shorter works, where it can act as a centerpiece. Putting five together, as Fuentes has done here, runs the risk of bogging the reader down. While Constancia would make a distinctive introduction for the novice, I believe it would be better approached by those already familiar with Fuentes and aware of his idiosyncrasies.

The stories are mysteries, more or less, borne of ghosts, parallels, surreal situations and secret tests of character. People are alive who should be dead, mannequins have souls, and each narrator is challenged by the most perplexing adversities (fear not, there is nothing Kafkaesque here; Fuentes was too original for that).

The lead-off story, ‘Constancia,’ is narrated by a lethargic and uncharismatic aging intellectual. The Russians make that exciting – Fuentes makes everything around it exciting. Consequently, the ramblings of Dr. Whitby Hull about his lusty but troubled marriage to a pious, uneducated Spanish woman and his ambivalent sense of white guilt as a white man in Savannah, Georgia is not terribly compelling. Luckily, this is only the entryway to a larger story as Fuentes weaves the deep voice of history’s pain into the narrative through the collective memory of refugees. Whitby’s privileged worries give over to the mysterious ailment of Constancia, setting him in pursuit of her past. The plot only becomes more dreamlike as the layers of history’s carnage unfold. It also includes one of the most genuinely redemptive conclusions for its main character that I have come across.

‘La Desdichada’ is considerably more fun. Two young men, aspiring writers in 1930s Mexico City, become captivated by a sad-eyed store mannequin and bring her into their apartment. Soon enough she creates a rift between them. It lacks the perverse horror required to rival Felisberto Hernández’ ‘The Daisy Dolls’ but it’s not exactly Lars and the Real Girl either. It is, however, a great space for Fuentes to show off his skills as a decadent writer:

We took taxi after taxi, the four of us squeezed in together, breathing the intense perfume of those strange creatures. It was the last night of the city we had known. The ball at San Carlos, where they took us that night (the perfumed couple, Pierrot and Columbine) was the annual saturnalia of the university students, who cast aside the medieval prohibitions of the Royal, Holy University of Mexico amid the Neoclassicism of the eighteenth-century palace’s stone staircases and columns: disguises, drinks, abandon, the always threatening movement of the crowd carried away by the dance, the drunkenness, the sensuality on display, the lights like waves; who was going to dance with Ambar, who with Estrella: which was the man, which was the woman, what would our hands tell us when we danced first with Columbine, then with Pierrot?

It is a compelling story with a vibrant cast and a subtle, phantasmagoric ending. Of all the stories, it is perhaps the most ambiguous in its resolution – though it contains only a hint of surrealism, it is never made clear what exactly the doll La Desdichada was nor what she expected of the boys.

Story No. 3, ‘The Prisoner of Las Lomas,’ is the least stylistically demanding of the set. The narrator, a lawyer and general snake in the grass, makes a gregarious and straightforward storyteller. The action develops at a pleasant clip and concepts such as the value of information, the invisibility of servants and the seclusion (invisibility) of the elite are all wrapped up in a story of blackmail, murder and the mob. If you’re looking for an easy way into the book, ‘The Prisoner of Las Lomas’ is your best bet.

The snag comes with ‘Viva Mi Fama’ – one of the longest stories and the most surreal of the set. People who think surrealism works best in small doses (like me) will find this very distracting. The plot follows an actress, a bullfighter and Francisco Goya in a love triangle of sorts, culminating in the luckless reincarnation of the bullfighter attempting to retrieve his former glory. Ceaseless romanticizing and sexualizing of bullfighting ensues. Culture clash is expected when reading world literature, but like most decadent writers, Fuentes didn’t know when to quit and the story is pretty much the definition of overkill. Of course, if you’re a fan of the word-drunk decadence movement, you’ll probably enjoy the whole thing far more than me. It is a good example of Fuentes’ delight in language, even if it does veer into self-indulgent stylistics.

Though Goya appears as a character in ‘Viva Mi Fama’ he’s not used half as well there as he was in the beginning of ‘Constancia,’ when Whitby Hull wanted to tell his wife that it is reason that never sleeps which produces monsters. A telling inversion. “Reason” has absolutely no place in these tales, any more than it had a place in the dreamscape of Aura.

The final of the five Stories for Virgins is a return to form. There is a strong hallucinogenic element in ‘Reasonable People’ but it doesn’t overwhelm the central plot, which involves miracles, incest and some luminous architectural discussion. Like Victor Hugo, he attempts to capture the soul of a people and their history in the form and substance of their architecture, described in a rapturous and enthusiastic prose: The approach to the Lincoln had become an obstacle course, thanks to the never-ending construction on Revillagigedo, Luis Moya, Marroquí, and Artículo 123, the streets around it. The Federal Attorney’s Office, the site of the old Naval Ministry, several popular movie houses, and a real jungle of businesses, garages, hardware stores, and used-car lots made that part of the city look like a metallic mountain range: twisted, tortured, rough, rusty; several stages in the life of steel were exposed there, like the entrails of an iron-age animal – literal, emblematic – they were bursting out, exposing themselves and revealing their age, the age of the beast, the geology of the city.

‘Reasonable People’ is marred only by a bait and switch conclusion. There is some excellent imagery during the hallucinogenic portion, where one of the architects discovers a windowless house leftover from the old City. Mexican houses are all blind on the outside; the blank walls around their entrances tell us only that these houses look inward, to the patios, the gardens, the fountains, the porticoes that are their true face. There he encounters a group of mutilated nuns and a corrupted semblance of the Virgin and Child. It does feel a little padded, but is more interesting than not.

As should be apparent, the curious title of the collection is an emblem of its Catholic focus. The Virgin is mentioned and mused upon in every one of these novellas. Being knowledgeable in Catholicism would likely help a reader to appreciate the imagery, and doubtless much has escaped me. Constancia is a reading experience where the more knowledge you have, the better. This is challenging material for the brain, so you’d better be prepared for that. Don’t expect another Aura. This book is not half so accessible, though it has its own rewards – and I thoroughly recommend ‘La Desdichada.’

Carlos Fuentes (1928-2012), the famous Mexican writer, died a couple of days ago. Hearing this I immediately decided it was time for me to investigate his oeuvre. I selected his 1962 novella Aura, translated by Lysander Kemp; having previously read his short story ‘The Doll Queen’ in an anthology, I now believe he had not only great talent as a writer, but also (rather more surprisingly) a stylish way with horror fiction.

As a word of advice, my own experience of reading the book is that it demands the reader to be at ease. I was midway through the second chapter when I realised I wasn’t enjoying the story because I was reading it much too fast. I put it aside, returning later to start at the beginning and give it my undivided attention. Aura is short, so make it last. Take your time and savour it.

The cast consists of four characters: Felipe Montero, a young historian; long deceased General Llorente, whose memoirs Felipe is meant to put in order; Consuelo Llorente, the decrepit still-living wife; and Aura, her bewitching green-eyed niece. The novella begins with a poetic quote from French historian Jules Michelet (1798-1874): Man hunts and struggles. Woman intrigues and dreams; she is the mother of fantasy, the mother of the gods. She has second sight, the wings that enable her to fly to the infinite of desire and the imagination… The gods are like men: they are born and they die on a woman’s breast… Fuentes undoubtedly used this quote to draw attention to one of the subtexts of the story. Felipe and the General are preoccupied with history, consistency and rationality while the women form expressions of timelessness and the uncanny. I do not feel free to discuss the plot in depth so will try to leave it vague and move on to the style.

Perhaps the first thing you’ll notice about Aura is that it’s written in second person present-tense, a notoriously difficult style to do well. Why did Fuentes choose it? It obviously wasn’t to “put yourself in this man’s boots,” since Felipe is too distinct an entity for that to work. It seems rather to mimic the style of dream. You eat in silence. You drink that thick wine, occasionally shifting your glance so that Aura won’t catch you in the hypnotized stare that you can’t control. You’d like to fix the girl’s features in your mind. Every time you look away you forget them again, and an irresistible urge forces you to look at her once more. In the wavering details, in the manner of Felipe’s behaviour, and in the blatant irrationality of the setting, Aura mimics a dreamscape perfectly without once devolving into unreadable surrealism. For that alone, it should be highly commended.

And as such, the cover art manages to be completely misleading and all the more accurate for that. Aura is described in colours and ages, her features never pinned down, so to have an actual woman on the cover would be to destroy the effect. Nor does a cat belong there. The suffering of felines is a peripheral theme of horror that has trickled down from Poe’s ‘The Black Cat’ to something as obscure as the Joan Aiken story ‘Listening’ and Aura joins their ranks, though the cats are so incidental to the plot that I cannot begin to grasp their significance. That’s possibly the point….

The book tends to induce a sense of unease. I like my horror oblique so the balance here is almost perfect and if you let it, it will give you the creeps. It is however in the self-conscious literary department, so if you’re looking for thrills and chills upfront, look elsewhere. Here there’s just a house lost in the middle of a city with a garden that isn’t accessible and a servant that’s never seen. The set-up – Felipe inveigled to stay in this rat-infested mausoleum and the obsession of Consuelo Llorente with reclaiming her vanished youth – puts one in mind of Sunset Boulevard, while Consuelo’s manner of living seems a deliberate evocation of Miss Havisham. I can’t discuss most any of this in detail, save the presence of religious imagery – from Consuelo’s room lit with votive candles to the General, grieving in his memoirs: “Consuelo, my poor Consuelo! Even the devil was an angel once,” to the comparison between Aura’s body during sex with that of Christ’s on the cross. Mixing the sacred and the profane can be used as a shock tactic or as an above-board interpretation of a spiritual experience. Aura manages to do both.

The liberal use of French in the text leads me to the belief that Carlos Fuentes was a closet Francophile, but in terms of readability that is the only challenge it offers. Otherwise, Fuentes’ writing has a simple clarity that serves to highlight the restrained lushness of the prose and it reads beautifully. The woman, you repeat as she comes close, the woman, not the girl of yesterday: the girl of yesterday – you touch Aura’s fingers, her waist – couldn’t have been more than twenty; the woman of today – you caress her loose black hair, her pallid cheeks – seems to be forty. Between yesterday and today, something about her green eyes has turned hard; the red of her lips has strayed beyond their former outlines, as if she wanted to fix them in a happy grimace, a troubled smile; as if, like the plant in the patio, her smile combined the taste of honey and the taste of gall. It is this element of beauty that gives the story its impact. There is an allure in what is depicted and at the same time a repulsion – and that, to my mind, is the essence of the macabre.

It’s a bit early for me to make any sweeping pronouncements but from what I’ve read I feel confident in saying this: Carlos Fuentes was a great writer and an artist. Recommended.